Going back a bit… Rick Spencer talks about the Usability of Generics…

I’ve been thinking a bit about Generics lately, with the growing conclusion that I will mostly use the ones that ship in the 2.0 version of the .NET Framework, but wrapping my head around a few situations where I could see myself defining Generic classes of my own. With all of these Generics thoughts in my head, I went back and re-read this blog entry from 2/10/2004 by Rick Spencer, and I really found it useful.

Rick is a Usability Specialist on the C# team, and he did a lot of work to understand how developers will use Generics in the next version of C# and you can read about that process in this great blog entry:

Studying the Usability of Generics in Visual C#… We’re going way back here, to October 2002. I was working with Anson Horton, who was at the time the PM for the C# compiler. We wanted to get some understanding of how users would react to generics and our documentation for them. We wanted to know if users would be able to master the syntax with a minimum of frustration, and would they get how to use them to write clean code. We recruited 5 Visual C# developers to come to the Microsoft Usability labs, and asked them to try some programming with generics….